The First 90 Days (14 page)

Distributors.
From distributors, you can learn about the logistics of product movement, customer service, and competitors’ practices and offerings. You can also get a sense of the distributors’ own capabilities.

Suppliers.
Suppliers can give you their perspectives on your organization in its role as a customer.

You can also learn about the strengths and flaws of internal operations management and systems.

Outside analysts.
Analysts can give you a fairly objective assessment of your company’s strategy and capabilities, as well as those of your competitors. Analysts also have a broad overview of the

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demands of the market and the economic health of the industry.

Indispensable internal information sources are the following:

Frontline R
&
D and operations.
These are the people who develop and manufacture your products or deliver your services. Frontline people can familiarize you with the organization’s basic processes and its relationships with key external constituencies. They can also shed light on how the rest of the organization supports or undermines efforts on the front line.

Sales and purchasing.
These people, and customer service representatives and purchasing staff, interact directly with customers, distributors, and suppliers. Often they have up-to-date information about trends and imminent changes in the market.

Staff.
Talk with heads or key staff members of the finance, legal, and human resources functional areas. These people have specialized but useful perspectives on the internal workings of the organization.

Integrators.
Integrators are people who coordinate or facilitate cross-functional interaction, including project managers, plant managers, and product managers. You can learn from them how links within the organization work and how the functions mesh. These people can help you discover the true political hierarchies and identify where internal conflicts lie.

Natural historians.
Keep an eye out for “old-timers” or natural historians—people who have been with the company for a long time and those who naturally absorb the organization’s history. From this group, you can learn about the company’s mythology and the roots of its culture and politics.

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.

Adopting Structured Learning Methods

Once you have a rough sense of what you need to learn and where to seek it—whether from reports or from conversations with knowledgeable people—the next step is to understand how best to learn.

Many managers’ inclination is to dive in and start talking to people. You will pick up much soft information this way, but this method is not efficient. Why? Because it can be time-consuming and because its lack of structure makes it difficult to know how much weight to place on various individuals’ observations. Your views may be shaped excessively by the first few people (or last few) with whom you talk. And people may seek you out early precisely so they can influence you.

Thus, you should consider using a structured learning process designed for new leaders. To illustrate the advantages of a structured approach, imagine that you plan to meet with your direct reports to elicit their assessments of the situation. How might you go about doing this? Bringing them together right away might be a mistake, because some will hesitate to reveal their views in a public forum.

Instead, you decide to meet them one-on-one. Of course, this has its drawbacks too, because you have to meet people in some order. You should therefore expect that the people who are later on your schedule will be talking to the earlier ones to try to get a sense of what you are after. This may both reduce your ability to gain a range of views about what is going on and allow others to interpret your messages in ways you might not intend.

Suppose that you decide to meet with your direct reports one-on-one. In what order will you meet with them? And how will you avoid being excessively influenced by what the first couple of people say to you? One approach is to keep to the same “script” in all your meetings. Its format might consist of brief opening remarks about yourself and your approach, followed by questions about the other person (background, family, and interests) and then a standard set of questions about the business. This approach is powerful because the responses you get are comparable. You can line them up side by side and analyze what is consistent and inconsistent about the responses. This helps you gain insight into which people are being more or less open.

When diagnosing a new organization, start by meeting with your direct reports one-on-one. (This is an example of taking a horizontal slice across an organization by interviewing people at the same level in different functions.) Ask them essentially the same five questions:

1. What are the biggest challenges the organization is facing (or will face) in the near future?

2. Why is the organization facing (or going to face) these challenges?

3. What are the most promising unexploited opportunities for growth?

4. What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the potential of these opportunities?

5. If you were me, what would you focus attention on?

These five questions, coupled with careful listening and thoughtful follow-up, are certain to elicit many insights. By asking everyone the same set of questions, you can identify prevalent and divergent views, and thus avoid being swayed by the first or most forceful or articulate person you talk to.
How
people answer can also tell you a lot about your new team and its politics. Who answers directly and who is evasive or prone to going on tangents? Who takes responsibility and who points fingers? Who has a broad view of the business and who seems stuck in a silo?

Once you have distilled these early discussions into a set of observations, questions, and insights, convene your direct reports as a group, feed back your impressions and questions, and invite some discussion. You will learn more about both substance and team dynamics by doing so, and will simultaneously demonstrate how quickly you have begun to identify key issues.

You need not follow this process rigidly. You could, for example, get an outside consultant to do some diagnosis of the organization and feed back the results to your group (see
“New Leader Assimilation Process
”). Or you could invite an internal facilitator to run the process. The point is that even a modest amount of structure—a script and a sequence of interactions such as meeting with people individually, doing some analysis, and then meeting with them together—can